Annotations on Choosing Love

29 Jun, 2026

A brief meditation on three selected works

*This is an archived post from September 4, 2025"

Kai Cheng Thom: I Hope We Choose Love¹ (2019)

“Integrity” is a word you hear used fairly frequently in social justice circles, but honesty and honour, as I know them, are values that come to me through my Chinese family and upbringing. Honesty, in my family, means saying what you mean, even if it is unpopular. Honour means acting in a way that your ancestors would be proud of, even if it requires personal sacrifices to do so. However, “honour” is not a word you hear very much in social justice community, and I feel its distinct lack as an influence on activist conduct.”

I find myself resistant to the archetypes of Chinese collectivism bound in words like honesty and honour. Honesty, as I’ve experienced, has often meant callous barbed words, poisoned by vague notions of filiopious hierarchical values. Honesty isn’t vulnerability, as is often accompanied by a distinct lack of self-awareness. Honour is a figurehead for ancestors many of us are disconnected from, and personal sacrifices are often a given—we are always giving ourselves to silent ghosts. In the world I come from, we do not look at the past, much less know how to honour them. Honesty and honour are two words I learned from the West, only to learn how to critically engage with them—strip them back and remake them into something else.

At the same time, I’d never thought about these words in justice concepts. Thom has a point—I’m just skeptical of seeking answers in the East in this way and wary of romanticizing ourselves to the point of assuming our pain only exists in the West.

For a time, I became quite valorized in my local community as a “good” upholder of social justice because I was very skilled at using the right language and doing the right things, and I tended to apologize unreservedly and perfectly when I “fucked up.” I now recognize this as a skill born of trauma: the ability to ceaselessly and accurately scan the people in one’s environment for a sense of what will please them, and then to enact it, no matter the cost to one’s long-term health.

I see you, and I see so many caretakers in this role. Perhaps we are stewards of the world, conditioned to earn our belonging with our constant vigilance.

I’m not a believer in justice because I have never gotten it from or against those who have harmed me. I really am not certain that it would be good for me if I did.

This—I wonder now whether I have ever questioned notions of justice in such a raw way. I feel it in my gut, as I read these words, that this must be true, yet I am now curious what justice could be. We are so busy putting out fires, creating conditions for ourselves just to survive, find enough compensation for our pain just to get by… Perhaps, as Thom may be alluding to later, we are all stuck in the trappings of white women notions of justice.

Interestingly, I have also seen many people who are not white women attempt to claim the same kind of “innocence” in their own calls for justice—which entails, first, that the “innocent” person is seen as free of all and any responsibility for the situation and, second, that the “guilty” party is then rendered available for punishment. The logic then follows: if someone has done something bad, it is okay to be aggressive or even violent toward them.

I think of an interview I watched with Mohammed El-Kurd and his book Perfect Victims, and this book I have not read, but the title stays with me: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. As we move toward that day, as I hear more and more white liberals around me wring their hands and say, “Isn’t it just awful?” I am also cognizant that moral judgement and the binary of innocent and guilty isn’t enough. In so many ways, we don’t have time to wait for people in power to recognize their power, negotiate them, feel bad about it, assign valence to their power, then maybe do something about the thing that ails their consciousness. “Bad” is so, so, so arbitrary, and so quick to change at the drop of a hat these days.

Punishment does not end violence; on the contrary, it breeds it.

Thom talks about how much we like punishment in Social Justice Land. I catch myself desiring revenge all the time, joking about the rich, the cops, and the very many people who get in the way of justice. My humour masks the anger that has nowhere else to go, and it stands to reason that the easiest outlet is to enact the same kinds of suffering we and others have endured. We know that violence begets violence begets violence, as Andrew Joseph White wrote in Hell Followed With Us. We are also imperfect creatures, often holding far more than we were designed for.

There are distinctions to be made between punishment, justice, and healing. Punishment is a gratifying process of enacting revenge that also perpetuates cycles of violence. Justice is a slow process of naming and transforming violence into growth and repair; it is also frustrating and elusive—and rarely ends in good feelings. Healing is the process of restoration for those who have been hurt, and although justice can aid this process, my own experience is that healing is an individual journey that is almost entirely separate from those who have caused me harm. No apology, or amount of money or punishment, can give me back the person I was, the body and spirit I possessed, before I was violated. Only I can do that.

It might be worth mentioning that there is also justice that we will not see in our lifetimes, ideals that come with disappointments when the inevitable impatience sets in—how much more must we take? One might cry during the slow process of transformation. I wonder if both justice and healing must be done simultaneously so it can be sustained, and whether there are ways of attaining that rush of hope outside of punishment.

We must reject despair and embrace healing, slow and imperfect though it may be, and turn instead to love—love strong enough to live without faith.

Though I am uncertain what this means, I like the flavour of these words. I am skeptical too of the vastness of all that we attribute to love. I want to sit with Thom’s image of love as “a flower growing in poisonous radiation” and something that simply is—unforced, unquestioned, and unapologetic.

Justice may not always be successful at making everyone, or anyone, feel good. We do not all have to like each other or be friends or share personal space. Justice should work toward reducing future harm through de-escalation, as well as ensuring that everyone has the basic resources they need to live, heal, and enjoy life—Yes! We have the right to enjoy our lives.

The messiness of a group reminds me of Prince Shakur’s essay once more. The idea that community can be ever-changing, that it can grow past a specific point of time, that folks can tag in and out, join each other, break up, break down, grow together, and grow apart. Sometimes I envy the other side of the political divide, who wear their hurt so prominently that it is all they see sometimes. We often spend so much time trying to be value neutral in our pain, and though it looms just as big, I fear we spend our time intellectualizing it away and pretending our moral superiority can sustain us through these dark times.

The community must accept its own responsibility for producing, condoning, and reproducing violence. We cannot spend years—decades—in community spaces watching people act badly and hurt each other, and making excuses for them, and then suddenly turn around and act shocked when an individual names that violence. We cannot pretend that we had no hand in covering up, minimizing, and even encouraging violence. We cannot have parties where everyone is deeply intoxicated, and physical, sexual, and verbal boundary-pushing is encouraged, and then act as though “abusers” are all sociopathic monsters who have infiltrated our otherwise perfect communities.

Again, I like this reminder that we are messy human beings, and we need ways of honouring ourselves and each other (I am now understanding why the romanticization of that word can be so precious). Maybe we just need more ways of loving each other deeply:

We must love ourselves. We must encourage love—love that is radical, love that digs deep. Love that asks the hard questions, that is ready to listen to the whole story and keep loving anyway. Love for the survivors, love for the perpetrators, love for the survivors who have perpetrated and the perpetrators who have survived. Love for the community that has failed us all. We live in poison. The planet is dying. We can choose to consume each other, or we can choose love. Even in the midst of despair, there is always a choice. I hope we choose love.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Care Webs² (2018)

What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it’s disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful?

What does it mean for our movements? Our communities/fam? Ourselves and our own lived experience of disability and chronic illness?

What does it mean to wrestle with these ideas of softness and strength, vulnerability, pride, asking for help, and not—all of which are so deeply raced and classed and gendered?

If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other? How do we learn to do this love work of collective care that lifts us instead of abandons us, that grapples with all the deep ways in which care is complicated?

One of the most insidious things (of which there are many) about the wellness industrial complex is the marketing of self-care in late stage capitalism. Self-care is a deeply exhausting endeavour that no amount of candles and yoga classes can fix. You feel it deep in the marrow when you are your entire world and your entire responsibility.

The balm in movement circles, as I see repeatedly, is community and collectivism. I love all of LPS’s questions here—the what ifs that cradle the core of our yearnings.

I wonder if she will talk about trust. Or is it really about faith?

It is an essay full of sick and disabled QTBIPOC stories that are well known in certain activist disabled QTBIPOC circles but at risk of disappearing or not being passed down, as the mediums where we find each other become less accessible/safe (Facebook in the age of Trump) or fade away (Web 2.0). And I am also thinking of care webs that have existed through time, that I know of through queer legend and myth, that do not often get counted as disabled stories and may not have thought of themselves as disabled care stories but still shared access tools, meds, and care—STAR House, the house started by Black and brown trans femme sex worker revolutionaries Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, with the rent paid by hustling and street sex work, as a safe space for trans people of color and street trans people to be free, be with each other, and share hormones and other supplies for healing and gender affirmation; the AIDS activist prisoner networks in the 1980s and ’90s that shared safer sex supplies and AIDS drugs and fought for prisoners to receive medical care; the mad movement’s underground safe houses and sharing of both pills and alternative treatments, as well as ways of coming off meds safely; the underground, often criminalized, harm-reduction networks like the New England Drug Users Union today where people share naloxone and fentanyl testing strips in their living rooms with folks who use opioids. We have found each other and offered healing and access to each other before and will again.

I am reminded through these short vignettes that while we ponder and think and philosophize, the responsibility of collective healing will always fall on the most marginalized first. There was an amazing conversation I had once with Serisha Iyar, the founder of the youth leadership organization, Leading in Colour. It was a conversation about burnout and the way we constantly feel like the only way toward anything is selling our stories, our energies, and our body and soul if the systems so desire. I still remembered the assuredness in which she described burnout as something there’s almost no point in talking about—it’s not real in the sense that there is no world in which we can be not burned out, especially as people with identities that are consistently and systematically marginalized in specific ways. (Fun fact: Leading in Colour just launched a podcast and program called Eldest Immigrant Daughters, which is awesome.) We push through it and spend the rest of our lives trying to delineate the parts of our personality from the parts of our trauma.

Of course, a part of my brain resists that as our fate, but the recognition that some have the privilege of burnout and some didn’t—that blew my mind. It was unexpectedly cathartic to know that it’s not unusual to feel periodically unhealed and skeptical of the wellness industry—it’s not unusual that there are many things we can’t mindfulness away.

Despite the unhealedness, we don’t stop dreaming, and we don’t stop building access. Maybe because of the unhealedness, it is (or perhaps should be) inevitable that we pass on what healing we can for the collective good.

This is for those of us who cannot closet our disability, Madness, Deafness, and illness—whose witnessable disability is just a fact of life that becomes a bullet target for violence, for attempts by police, doctors, and families to murder us and lock us up. This is for all of us evading that capture and control, that being disposed of—who still have need. This is for everyone Black and brown who freeze, who feel we could never, ever think about asking someone to do our dishes or clean our toilet or help us dress, because that is the work we or our families have done for little or no money during enslavement, colonial invasion, immigration, and racist poverty—and this is for those of us who have both cleaned toilets and wiped asses for little or no pay and respect and who too need and deserve care with respect and dignity. This is for all of us, especially Black, Indigenous, and brown femme people, who have kept our communities alive after being both abandoned and policed by the state, and in the face of medical experimentation and denial of health insurance.

This paragraph stokes a fire in me, reminding me of that unsettling gut feeling of sitting in colonial classrooms and being asked to participate in systems that overlook the suffering of people we deem invisible anyway. I am reminded of the time I felt like I was fighting for my life just trying to convince my peers—peers who were/will be working in these violent systems—that not all of us are given the respect and dignity our Code lays out.

There have been a million ways sick and disabled people have accessed the care we need over the centuries, and I don’t have time to go over them. A light once-over will say that in many precolonial contact communities, there existed ways of being disabled that did not mean stigma, shame, exile, or death. Disabled Cherokee scholar Qwo-Li Driskill has remarked that in precontact Cherokee, there are many words for people with different kinds of bodies, illnesses, and what would be seen as impairments; none of those words are negative or view those sick or disabled people as defective or not as good as normatively bodied people.

I discussed this in my last essay, but English is a language of connotations—individual words can be taken out of any context, yet still hold the same positive or negative valence. Asking someone to reframe anxiety as a neutral or positive thing, for example, is counter-intuitive to the language itself. I know that at least for languages like Chinese, context creates meaning. A character by itself can change drastically when they combine with others, and that feels like the larger metaphor for community.

With the arrival of white settler colonialism, things changed, and not in a good way. For many sick and disabled Black, Indigenous, and brown people under transatlantic enslavement, colonial invasion, and forced labor, there was no such thing as state-funded care. Instead, if we were too sick or disabled to work, we were often killed, sold, or left to die, because we were not making factory or plantation owners money. Sick, disabled, Mad, Deaf, and neurodivergent people’s care and treatment varied according to our race, class, gender, and location, but for the most part, at best, we were able to evade capture and find ways of caring for ourselves or being cared for by our families, nations, or communities—from our Black and brown communities to disabled communities.

In a post-plantation world that has replicated those systems in far more convoluted and deeply entrenched ways… in a world where empathy is the newest villain in the story of people in power…

I first learned of the term “mutual aid” as an anarchist teenager, in books like Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and in a lot of zines that quoted white guy theorists like Kropotkin. All of these writers, and many other anarchist and antiauthoritarian writers, use the term to mean a voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit. Mutual aid, as opposed to charity, does not connote moral superiority of the giver over the receiver. White people didn’t invent the concept of mutual aid—many precolonial (and after) Black, Indigenous, and brown communities have complex webs of exchanges of care.

This word has been thrown around a lot in my life, especially after getting to know amazing folks within the Palestinian liberation movement. At first, it struck me as distinctly utopian, and as I was reading The Serviceberry, it felt simultaneously easy and difficult to replicate on a larger scale. As I’ve said, I’ve seen mutual aid in my personal life—have greatly benefited and saved by it when I ran into very difficult times. On the organizational level, however, I am still ruminating on these webs of care and the overwhelming task of repairing of certain threads or forging new ones. I still wonder at the possibility of mutual aid on a systematic scale, and the funding it would require to move folks away from state-based care. I blame the limits of my imagination, but sometimes it feels like a snake eating its own tail when envisioning new systems and parsing out the steps to get there.

The community is not a magic utopia, just like our families weren’t, and we don’t all just magically love each other, or even like each other, let alone agree on every political issue. I think about people I know who are mean or angry or bitter or “hard to like”—and disabled—and how that confluence is not a surprise or an accident, because many of us are indeed in a shitty mood, mean, or bitter from withstanding decades of ableism and the isolation that it brings. I think about the people I know who I don’t want to die lying in their own piss, but I don’t want to be the one who changes their diaper either. I think about the things I still can’t ask friends to help me with—cleaning the house when it’s incredibly nasty after I’ve been in pain for weeks, dealing with shit or blood. I think about my friend’s statement that she shouldn’t have to rely on being liked or loved to get care.

LPS presents five stories that are incredibly inspirational to the way we imagine care webs and care futures. They’re nuanced stories, rooted in the awareness that care can also intersect with race, wealth, disability, etc. To punctuate the end of these stories with “community is not a magic utopia” is kind of like being dumped with a bucket of cold holy water—it’s a dash of reality that can be tough, but it’s also the thing that cleanses the doubts and doubles down on the dreaming.

There will always be a lot we can never understand about the way members of our communities experience life. There will always be things you can explain for hours, read hundreds of books, and still have only a tenuous grasp on lived experience. Every web needs to function for the members within it, and there needs to be a level of faith and trust in each other to make it all work. As LPS’s friend says, no one should have to rely on being liked or loved to get care. Love for each other as a whole should be the undercurrent for all that we do. Love for the human capacity to mutually uplift each other is perhaps the blue sky dreaming I want to fall back into when—in moments of darkness—I lose faith in myself and others as individuals.

Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba: Avoiding Burnout and Going the Distance³ (2023)

But what activists call “burnout” is rarely characterized by exhaustion alone. If people experiencing burnout were simply exhausted and nothing more, they could likely rest away the problem. But for activists, burnout often describes a deeper issue: a profound exhaustion paired with an injury to our dignity or sense of belonging or a violation of our boundaries. As Dean Spade told Kelly on Movement Memos, “Burnout usually means I went way past my boundaries, or I deeply believed I wasn’t good enough unless I did more than I could do.” People experiencing burnout may feel unappreciated, betrayed, exploited, blamed, or as though they no longer belong, in addition to feeling physically and emotionally depleted. Too often, burnout marks the end of an organizer’s work, as many depart our movements resentful, weary, or even in despair. This cycle of self-destruction weakens our movements. But it also flies in the face of what we are fighting for: a world where people are not treated as disposable or ground down in the name of their productivity.

I really resonated with this broader definition of burnout, and I believe it applies to many types of work we engage in beyond boots-to-the-ground activism. I am constantly reminded by my friends that activism can look like so many things. Whether we are pushing boundaries at work, breaking rules, going the distance, participating in care webs, finding yourself hypervigilant to the suffering of people around you…the list is endless. And when love and care is additionally boundless, we can also find ourselves boundaryless. I want to get to boundaries later, but for now, let’s take a moment to appreciate the ways we get used to grinding ourselves down to do more at every turn.

Wow, we’re amazing. Look at all we’re doing/have done/will do!

And damn, we’re tired. Wait, when was the last time we’ve been…not tired?

We must understand that “surges” cannot structure our whole organizing lives. For the most part, transformation is slow work, and as such, we must find ways to sustain it for the long haul. “Real change, real development, real growth, real organizing happens slowly,” Lungo said. “It happens over time. It happens on the day-to-day, and in encouraging each other to find the balance between these big bursts and moments.”

Lungo warned that a “thirst for something big or monumental” that would “move and shake people in big ways” can inhibit an activist’s ability to pace their work, which can lead to both burnout and strategic failure. “We actually don’t need to move everyone, all at once,” she explained. “We need to move a smaller portion of people than we actually think” to initiate major shifts in political thought and action. “The shift and change, it takes time.” Lungo noted that smaller actions and “the everyday work that you do with each other and other humans” is as important as “creating big giant marches or beautiful actions or big takeovers.”

As we’ve seen in recent years with a few big movements, it’s easy to lose steam when we don’t see immediate results. It’s easy to feel defeated when institutions push us back to the brink of breakdown in this crazymaking world—it’s easy to feel like maybe you’re the one losing grasp on reality, even when reality isn’t inevitable.

There is an essay I came across recently on Taylor Swift and the marketing genius of “hyperreality”. In it, writer Tara Maggiulli compares Taylor to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of Disneyland: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”

From my understanding, entities like Taylor Swift, Disney, and all the Brave New World-esque distractions in our world reflect a need for distraction that may or may not be necessary. The real world, when contrasted with the surrealism of extended pop multiverses, is dreary and dull and everything is broken and bad. The more there is to remind us of that version of reality, the more reality feels like all of those things.

The reality of reality, however, is far more vast than the dumpster fire people can’t see past. Like Taylor Swift’s inner world, there are wins and there are losses—for the everyday individual living their life, progress and regress aren’t linear. Multiple things can be true. While increasing fascism is coming to a boil on a global scale, people are also coming together in unprecedented ways. These conversations are coming at a time of deep uncertainty, where it feels like there are only two paths for the world to torpedo toward. The building tension, anxiety, and rage I feel in others—the hopelessness afforded to those able to disconnect from the ways others must survive—contrasted with the momentary hope we pass along like candles at a vigil—all of these can and do coexist.

Is there a place that makes you feel whole or revived in some way? How often are you able to inhabit that space? If that place is inaccessible, what ritual or experience brings you closest to it? What practices or experiences help you experience a sense of renewal? Are these practices an ongoing part of your life?

Not just rest, as Hayes and Kaba says, but rejuvenation and nourishment. I often conflate my distractions as rest and struggle to identify what nourishment actually feels like. Together with my therapist, I once explored five different types of rest (creative, head-empty, social, Sagittarian/leaning/knowledge, and sleep), and still it all feels conflated into one out of reach thing sometimes.

We have learned that letting go can be a beautiful thing. Honoring what a group or project has accomplished and what it has meant to us while preserving its history and, most importantly, carrying its lessons forward, can be an emotional process, but not everything in organizing is about fighting tooth and nail. Some moments are about recognizing where we have been, what we have learned, how we have grown, and what we now believe the future demands of us.

Sometimes, we are forced to let go when we are not ready. Other times, we hold the thing tight to our chest, hoping it will evolve to meet our needs someday. I’ve come to realize there is so much in our lives that is cyclical, and so many people have walked in our shoes in one way or another. While our intersections feel unique, we are not alone in dreaming of the future. There is a lineage of us that has brought us here, reading these words, thinking these thoughts, and building our imaginations. Much of our world these days want us to forget the past—to build instead a future on quicksand, with futures borne from artificial ideas of progress. History has always done its utmost to push away its knowledge keepers in favour of the victors’ mythologies.

But there will always be people who remember.

There is a thought-provoking episode of Steven Universe where the titular character finds humans in an alien “zoo”. The aliens learned that in order to mitigate rebellion, it’s important to keep them happy. For generations upon generations, they live in a tropical paradise, with a voice telling them what to do throughout the day. In this perfect utopia, the humans only know bliss.

I wondered, as I was watching this, whether this is how some might define utopia. There are definitely days where I wish I could feel completely unburdened by my thoughts in this way, and yet even as this episode shows later on—and as extensively studied through speculative works such as 1984—hurt can happen even without language for it. The discomforting feeling of resistance to the status quo can happen without language.

Even for the zoo people, I wondered if their bodies might remember what their ancestors might be like, far, far, far into the past. Perhaps every generation, a handful of them feel that niggling discomfort—nuances that can’t be encapsulated in a 10-minute episode of a children’s cartoon, no matter how incredibly written.

The thing is, the future does not demand our perfection. Utopias in itself are unhelpful beyond its conception—it’s the act of moving toward spaces where all humans can thrive that I am interested in. And there are so many of us out there trying our best every day.

It isn’t always easy to choose love. It can sometimes be rather painful, especially when you bind yourself to ideas of what love must be. Every day is just trying—sometimes failing, sometimes falling, sometimes flying.

However you are reading this today, I hope you’re choosing love too.